#iOS11 is not as social as iOS 10

Background

In the past, iOS contained built in social media sharing features which included Twitter and Facebook. These features made it easy for apps to connect to social platforms in order to share content with features built right in to iOS. In iOS 11, the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system, these features have been removed. As a result, users will now be responsible for installing and using social network apps from the App Store that have share extensions and account management.

While, on the surface, this seems like a big deal, it really has been coming for some time. For a while now, Facebook has been authenticating 3rd party app logins through their own app or from their mobile webpage, instead of using the iOS login prompts.. You can even sync your contacts through the Facebook app, which used to be managed in iOS settings

So What Does This Mean for Apps?

At the time of this writing, a lot of Twitter applications use the built-in Twitter APIs in iOS. As a result, they will need to be updated so that they do not give an error that there are no Twitter accounts set up in the settings app.

Conclusion

While I think that this update to the handling of social sharing will not change much in the way of everyday consumers using their iOS devices, I think it was a great thing to be able to manage all  social account logins from one place in the Settings app. Android has this, and a user can even add accounts  that were not included with the OS. I doubt they would do this, but I really hope that the engineers at Apple have something in mind to replace the previous social framework, and will surprise us in a future version of iOS.

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